Ancient Mesopotamia Ancient Mesopotamias contributions to humankind's progress were many and varied, including the development of writing, the wheel, metal working, literature, and science. Sumerians and their successors wrote poetry, created a mythology, and produced the world's first epic, the story of Gilgamesh. They built the first cities on the flood plains of the and Euphrates. Sumerian mathematicians used square roots and quad- ratic equations and created the first accurate calendars. But knowledge of this ancient civilization and its contributions was scant until the nineteenth century, when Mesopotamia's remains were unearthed by archaeologists. Until the midtwentieth century, ancient Mesopotamian civilization was taught in Iraq if at all-mainly as a distant phenomenon almost unrelated to the modern country. This gradually changed in the second half of the twentieth century, however when Iraqi artists and poets began to draw on this heritage in paintings and literature, while the government turned its attention to propagat the notion of a Mesopotamian heritage as an integral pa of Iraqi tradition. But in the early decades of the modern state, Mesopotamia's civilization played a very small role